In a typical Hollywood action movie, the hero skirts death to complete a mission. Bad guys shoot, cars explode, objects fall from the sky, but all just miss. If any one of those things happened would be dead. Yet the hero survives.
In some respects, the story of our universe resembles an action movie. A slight change to any one of the laws of physics would likely have caused some disaster that would have disrupted the normal evolution of the universe and made life impossible. For example, if the strong nuclear force had been physics must be so finely tuned that the very existence of such a universe becomes improbable.
Some cosmologists have tried to reconcile the existence of our universe with the seeming improbability of its existence by hypothesizing that our universe is but one of many universes within a wider array called the multiverse. In almost all of those universes, the laws of physics might not allow the formation of a good chance to get the “right” set of laws at least once.
But just how exceptional is the set of physical laws governing our universe? The view that the laws of physics are finely tuned arises largely from the difficulty scientists have had that would be compatible with life.
The conventional way scientists explore whether a particular constant of physics is finely tuned is to tweak it while leaving all other constants unaltered. The scientists then “play the movie” of that universe—they do calculations, what-if scenarios, or computer simulations—to see what disasters occur. But there is no reason to tweak just compatible with the formation of complex structures and perhaps even some forms of intelligent life.
Fine tuning has been invoked by some cosmologists as indirect evidence for the multiverse. Do our findings therefore call the concept of the multiverse into question? I do not think this is necessarily the case for two reasons. First, certain models of the birth of the universe would lead us to expect be the source of solutions to certain other long-standing puzzles in cosmology.
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